John Updike dies

John Updike. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/27/john-updike-dies1)

John Updike, the great chronicler of sex and divorce among ordinary people in postwar America, died this morning, aged 76.

A prolific novelist, short-story writer, poet and critic, Updike's most famous works include The Witches of Eastwick, and his quartet of novels about the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. Two of the Rabbit books won the Pulitzer prize for fiction - first Rabbit is Rich, in 1981, and then Rabbit at Rest, in 1991.

Updike's death was announced by Nicholas Latimer of Alfred A Knopf, his publisher. "It is with great sadness that I report that John Updike died this morning at the age of 76, after a battle with lung cancer. He was one of our greatest writers, and he will be sorely missed," said Latimer in a statement.

A literary writer who frequently appeared on bestseller lists, the tall, hawk-nosed Updike wrote novels, short stories, poems, criticism, the memoir Self-Consciousness and even a famous essay about baseball great Ted Williams. He was prolific, even compulsive, publishing more than 50 books in a career that started in the 1950s. Updike won virtually every literary prize going; only the Nobel eluded him. To compensate, he awarded it to one of his fictional characters, Henry Bech, the womanising, egotistical Jewish novelist who featured in a number of his works.

Updike was famous for his depiction of sex; in November 2008, he won a lifetime achievement award at the Literary Review's annual Bad Sex in Fiction award, which celebrates "crude, tasteless or ridiculous sexual passages in modern literature".

Born in 1932 in Shillington, a small town in Pennsylvania, Updike spoke for millions of Depression-era readers raised by "penny-pinching parents", united by "the patriotic cohesion of world war two" and blessed by a "disproportionate share of the world's resources", and America's postwar, suburban boom of "idealistic careers and early marriages".

He captured, and sometimes embodied, a generation's confusion over the civil rights and women's movements, and opposition to the Vietnam war. Updike was called a misogynist, a racist and an apologist for the establishment. On purely literary grounds, he was attacked by Norman Mailer as the kind of author appreciated by readers who knew nothing about writing.

More often he was praised for his flowing, poetic writing style. Describing a man's interrupted quest to make love, Updike likened it "to a small angel to which all afternoon tiny lead weights are attached". Nothing was too great or too small for Updike to poeticise. He might rhapsodise over the film projector's "chuckling whir" or look to the stars and observe that "the universe is perfectly transparent: we exist as flaws in ancient glass."

A tall, shy, priggish boy as a teenager, Updike found his greatest pleasure in drawing and writing. He was an accomplished cartoonist and hoped to work as an animator for Walt Disney. He wrote regularly for his high school newspaper, and won a scholarship to read English at Harvard.

He graduated in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford studying at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of staff at the New Yorker. In 1957, he left New York, with its "cultural hassle" and melting pot of "agents and wisenheimers", and settled with his first wife and four children in Ipswich, Massachusetts, a "rather out-of-the-way town" about 30 miles north of Boston.

"The real America seemed to me 'out there', too heterogeneous and electrified by now to pose much threat of the provinciality that people used to come to New York to escape," Updike later wrote.

"There were also practical attractions: free parking for my car, public education for my children, a beach to tan my skin on, a church to attend without seeming too strange."